> "As a PST file or exported MSG files, this could be done though, yes?
> The issue is that these emails involve the private email address of someone you'd recognize, and we're trying to replace it with a placeholder address as to not expose it."
From the way it reads it looks like he is asking how to bulk remove an email address from the archived messages so when they are turned over they don't contain the redacted email address.
I assume it would be embarrassing and/or problematic to share the email addresses of various ambassadors and other government officials in public records. You could also read something nefarious into it if you want.
This whole fishing expedition is hilarious and transparently political. The Bush administration ran private email servers to avoid FOIA requests, then nuked millions of saved emails when his term was up to avoid handing them over. I didn't see any huge circus or massive outcry about that.
The idea that we should be able to immediately read all the correspondence written by any public official also seems silly... it just encourages public officials not to use email. People are allowed to have private conversations. A reasonable compromise might be a time limit... say emails are held sealed for X years after leaving office, then made public?
The removal of private email addresses should be left to the State Department who was in charge of releasing those emails. In the emails released so far, Clinton's actual address has been removed from the To: field (physically, as in it was whited-out) as is at least one name from the From: field
But I could see this as a result of incompetency, that is, the IT person didn't realize that it's not up to him to redact addresses, the State Dept. could do it. I know that sounds naive but we're talking about an IT person who posted this question on Reddit using an account easily connected to him, so, incompetency is inherent in the scenario.
edit: Apparently, there is a Slashdot user named "StoneTear" who has been posting since 2002 and has made reference about working in government and knows about their data retention policies. So that mostly rules out the possibility of IT-guy-is-just-the-Senator's-nephew-in-law-who-got-asked-because-to-do-IT-because-no-one-else-was-around:
I think people are being way too harsh on this guy. Most people make a habit of using the same username everywhere and it's not a problem until there's a sudden national interest in every cat photo they've commented on.
2 years ago it wasn't even clear that HRC would run, let alone that her emails would become such a large and specifically scrutinized aspect of the campaign. Yes, it would've been better if Combetta had the foresight to avoid this sticky situation, but I don't think it's reasonable to claim he's incompetent because of this quite unusual confluence of events.
His two mistakes were using a known username and calling attention to how "VIP" his VIP was. Some people will say the only purpose for the latter is to brag, but I disagree. People on online forums are frequently both hostile and caustic. A likely response to his question would be "Tell them you can't do that". Combetta's emphasis on the VIP's stature was a pre-emptive attempt to get the help he needed without bickering about whether or not he had authority to shut down the request. Since that was obviously not on the table for a sysadmin trying to earn a living, he needed to make it clear that he was dealing with orders originating from well above his pay grade.
People will also say Combetta should've known this was illegal, which I think is silly too. HRC is a laywer. Everyone in politics is a lawyer. There is no intrinsic moral compass around email retention policies, and even if you say "Hmm, that doesn't sound fair", well, we all know that the law isn't perfect -- unfair doesn't make it illegal per se, and none of us would be employed if we had the full moral latitude we'd like to decline employer requests (for example, there's a good argument that modern marketing as an industry has deep moral flaws, but how many companies can afford not to market themselves? There's a lowest-common-denominator factor that drags everyone down. The option becomes indigence or compromise, accepting that everything is not necessarily as we'd like it to be).
If your client is a bunch of lawyers, and you're an IT guy (not a lawyer), and you work for a contracting firm that treats this like a legit request, you're going to assume that what they're asking is legal. Unless something is fundamentally and blatantly immoral (and I don't believe specific sniggles over email retention laws are), I don't think he should be blamed for complying with the directives issued by his clients and allowed by his firm.
This is an embarrassing time for Combetta, to be sure. Let's not unjustifiably heap it on. As far as I'm concerned, he should be fully covered by respondeat superior.
I say all this as someone who is probably going to vote for Trump and thinks that HRC should be prosecuted.
Bias disclaimer: I'm voting third party, so a pox on all of their houses.
I can't help but fret, however, over how lame Congress has become in the last few decades. Congress is a separate but equal part of the government. In fact, if push came to shove, they're the ones who are supposed to have all the power. Congress can pick and fire a president under extreme circumstances. The president can't do the same with Congress.
But whether it's this fishing expedition or oversight of the intelligence community, Congress is missing in action and/or impotent. They serve subpoenas. Sometimes the people show up, sometimes they don't. They request evidence. Sometimes they get it, sometimes not. Sometime it takes years and they only get a little bit. Nothing happens.
If the Congress is conducting an investigation, even the idiotic political investigations they seem so good at, this is the government that is asking questions. People should be going to jail and/or disbarred for the types of shenanigans that regularly go on. But nope. It seems all too easy to say, well, it's just Congress, you know? Nobody takes any of that stuff seriously, right?
In the 1970s the Church Committee took apart the national intelligence apparatus and tried to fix a lot of problems. I don't see this Congress or any future ones being able to investigate and improve their own parking garage, much less anything of any national significance.
If your Congressperson is doing silly political stuff? Fire them and elect somebody else. But don't make the institution itself a politically powerless charade of a legislative body. That destroys a much-needed error-correcting mechanism.
Yep, but it became under their jurisdiction when it was discovered that she did government business via the private server. There are various different reasons why (and when) her email was requested by investigators. If I'm not mistaken, the existence of Clinton's private server was alluded to when Guccifer 1.0 hacked Sidney Blumenthal's emails, which included memos to her private address:
In an unrelated tangent, when the Secretary of State's original search found few emails involving Clinton's ostensible state.gov address, a Tumblr meme (which was in support of Clinton) caught someone's eye who then inquired how Clinton was sending messages if they weren't showing up on her state.gov account: http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/06/hillar...
^ Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew email server, the State Department confirmed Thursday...The email was not among the tens of thousands of emails Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. Abedin, who also used a private account on Clinton's server, provided a copy from her own inbox after the State Department asked her to return any work-related emails.
The State Department did not get a warrant before asking Clinton and her staff to turn over emails that went through Clinton's server.
> The State Department did not get a warrant before asking Clinton and her staff to turn over emails that went through Clinton's server.
Only emails related to official business. The distinction is crucial to these questions of law, but is consistently forgotten or elided, even by this Hill article.
> Only emails related to official business. The distinction is crucial to these questions of law, but is consistently forgotten or elided, even by this Hill article.
It's not forgotten. No one believes her. (Except maybe you.)
She deleted the personal emails. Who does that? At most you don't turn them over, and then store them somewhere. Hard disks are cheap.
But no, she deleted them, making 100% sure no one could ever dispute her.
And I seem to remember an official email she did not disclose being discovered when the other person in the email disclosed it. So she is known to have withheld official emails.
Deleting personal emails is common and legal, even for the Secretary of State.
You're essentially arguing that a person who desires privacy is therefore suspicious. I would hope that folks here on HN recognize that's a bullshit argument.
His argument is that she had the option to achieve privacy (by complying with the request and simply keeping her private emails). Instead they decided to not let anyone ever have the possibility to verify if she complied.
She chose to achieve privacy by making any future investigation impossible.
Is it legal? I guess, assuming she told the truth (and made no mistakes) about which emails were relevant. But personally I would like to hold people in office to a higher transparency and ethics standard than "strictly legal".
If I came on here and said that Google should keep a copy of every email ever written or received in Gmail, just in case the police wanted to look at it later, how many folks here would think that is a good privacy policy? I'd guess not many. But that is what you're suggesting Clinton should have done with her personal email.
If a piece of information is stored so that it can be given to someone else later, that's not really very private. Privacy means the right to keep things away from others, and it includes the right to delete things.
Now maybe you want to argue that certain public officials should not permitted to have privacy while they are in office. That's fine, make that argument, but it's not the state of things now, legally or culturally.
And consider that there might be unintended consequences. It might deter some great people from considering public service. And it might put a hole in the legal concept of privacy that others will try to widen later.
I would argue that if we're going to be serious about legally protecting privacy, we need to be consistent. "Protect privacy, except for politicians I don't like" is not a particularly strong legal framework.
I don't even need to argue that certain public officials should not be permitted to have privacy while in office. She has a right to privacy. I am not arguing she doesn't.
I am arguing she made a series of poor choices that led to a situation where the only way she can live up to the standards we should expect from a public official (a verifiable paper trail for business pertaining to office) is by keeping a record of her private communications as well.
This is why you don't use your private email address for official business. If you want privacy while in office you don't use your private email server for official business. You aren't supposed to anyway. It's very simple and very reasonable.
The problem is you are taking her word for it. I think she's a liar, and her actions just reinforce that.
I do NOT demand she hand over personal email! No. Only that she make it possible for a 3rd party to sort her emails into private/public.
She has the right to delete personal email - but only if it's actually personal, and I don't trust her to be the one to decide that.
She brought this on herself by mixing them in the first place. Want to maintain your privacy when you know you job requires publicity? Keep your public and private lives separate. She chose not to.
It's fine that she deleted her personal emails. Everyone does that.
No one really cares about this issue except the House Republicans. They really are trying their hardest to figure out something here, but are obviously coming up empty. It just makes them look foolish.
We've asked you to please comment civilly and substantively or not at all, and now you've added personal attacks. We ban accounts that continue to post this way.
This is wrong, as a matter of law. It doesn't matter who set up the email account - any emails you generate as part of official business are official records. They're government property.
> any emails you generate as part of official business are official records. They're government property.
But not personal emails.
Read the Hill article very carefully and see if it identifies whether we're talking about official business or personal. It doesn't.
The House GOP is careful to avoid making that distinction, because their goal is to feed a sense of impropriety--a goal which seems to be well-met here on HN, judging by the comments.
But the distinction matters, it does exist in law, and it is based on content and parties, not servers. Sending official State business email from a server does not automatically expose the full content of that server to federal record-keeping laws.
>The House GOP is careful to avoid making that distinction, because their goal is to feed a sense of impropriety--a goal which seems to be well-met here on HN, judging by the comments.
No, the sense of impropriety was fed by Hillary Clinton herself when she turned over a tiny fraction of emails relating to official business and then destroyed the rest so nobody could ever retrieve them.
Honestly, that people can't see, by now, after the cattle futures, after the Rose Law documents, after the Clinton Foundation, after the destroyed emails, that this woman is crooked... I can't help but be amazed.
Again, to make this perfectly clear: she was only required to turn over official business emails. And was legally permitted to do what she wanted with her personal emails, including delete them.
It is nonsensical to say that following the law implies impropriety.
On top of this, the FBI recovered and reviewed many of the emails that she deleted, and did not find anything damning. They declined to recommend a prosecution.
Setting aside the politics of "it's Hillary Clinton and she's running for president," there is no evidence that she tried to break the law, or succeeded in doing so.
The evidence shows that she wanted some privacy, and even Hillary Clinton is entitled to that under the law.
>Again, to make this perfectly clear: she was only required to turn over official business emails.
Again, to make this perfectly clear: she was required to turn over official business emails and she omitted thousands of them. She deleted the ones she didn't turn over and had the server purged.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to set up a server such that your personal email is intermingled with official government communications and then claim you're the only person who can go through that server looking for official email that shouldn't have been there.
>The evidence shows that she wanted some privacy, and even Hillary Clinton is entitled to that under the law.
People try to use privacy rights to cover criminal activity on a regular basis. That's why we have subpoenas and laws against destruction of evidence.
There was a criminal investigation, and a freedom of information request. So yes, according to the courts, they WERE able to forcibly make her turn over the emails.
you raise the point: where in the timeline of subpoenas or other legal requests does the attempt at modifying the email archive, does Combetta's post fit?
My understanding: Combetta's post comes 1 day after Hillary had reached an agreement about turning them over.
So was she dealing in bad faith with the govt? To be determined I guess?
It is the job of the FBI to redact the information before it is released. It is ILLEGAL for the IT guy to change any of it when you are given a court order to turn over everything unmodified. But apparently he keeps accidentally bumping the delete key.
> It is the job of the FBI to redact the information before it is released.
Its is the job of the FBI to redact information they choose to (or are required to) release in accordance with any legal, operational, etc., concerns applicable to the FBI.
OTOH, its quite possible that the Clinton camp anticipated that they might have reason to directly release some or all of the emails to entities other than the FBI.
So what is the point? A discussion about what could be possible? He could dress up as Osama bin Laden and crash his car through the White House gate but that doesn't mean that it's something that Secretary Clinton believes is necessary for her campaign.
Similarly, yes, he could delete the emails after being told they were part of an investigation, but that would lead to unwanted consequences. Could he have deleted them before any investigation started? Sure, then it would just be a cloud of suspicion, but no legal ramifications.
My original point was that as soon as Clinton agreed to turn over the emails, it was in the State Department's ballpark to determine which were eligible for disclosure, as the emails were written during her time at State and ostensibly dealt with State business. Not sure why you felt you had to argue that she had the capability of just destroying her servers. If she had done that, we wouldn't be having this discussion because she likely wouldn't be in the race.
Yeah, a private email account which was used extensively for official government business.
With no work email account ever setup.
It's a matter of law that any and all work related emails on a personal email address are to be handed over for future FOIA requests, etc. upon leaving office.
If I used my personal email address for all communication with my companies clients for work, they'd demand all of those emails when I left the company.
> If I used my personal email address for all communication with my companies clients for work, they'd demand all of those emails when I left the company.
But they wouldn't be able to get them, no matter how hard they demanded.
Personal email addresses exist. Companies have to deal with that fact.
> But they wouldn't be able to get them, no matter how hard they demanded
I work in securities. My work emails must be archived. If I send work email from my personal email (a) that is potentially illegal and (b) I must promptly turn them over to my archives. If I refuse b, I face civil and potentially criminal censure.
Blows me away how finance has stricter controls than the people conducting bombing raids.
This is not a relevant analogy because it's not under dispute that Clinton used her email address for personal conversations, and there is nothing in the Reddit post or the Hill news story that indicates whether we're talking about personal or official business emails.
If your employer tried to force Gmail to turn over to them all your emails with your spouse and friends, no matter the subject or content, you and Google would fight it. And rightly so.
The House GOP members of the Benghazi committee are trying their hardest to get their hands on Clinton's personal emails, to dig for embarrassing messages to release. They already have her official business emails; they have had them for years. And they have openly admitted that the entire purpose of the committee is to undercut her presidential campaign.
So says you, but thankfully the law holds itself to a higher standard. Specifically, the law requires evidence of criminal activity to begin a criminal prosecution.
Your standard is that any time someone claims something, we can all act like the opposite of that claim is true, even if there is no actual evidence. By that standard, everyone is guilty until proven innocent. Again, thankfully, the law does not work that way.
And if they want more, they can always get a search warrant for them.
That would help the Republicans gain back some credibility if they did. Right now everyone considers this a colossal waste of time, exemplary of Republican waste.
Republicans are quickly finding that there are limits to their political powers.
The public needs to be forceful in telling the House to stop wasting government money on Hillary emails.
The easiest route would simply be to refuse me referrals. If I had a golden parachute deal, it would be invalidated by such an action. Any vested stocks I had would be in jeopardy. They can try to blackball me. They can cut off insurance benefits unexpectedly.
And all that before lawyers get involved...
If you do work on a personal email, your employer may later demand access to those emails. So don't do it.
> The Bush administration ran private email servers to avoid FOIA requests, then nuked millions of saved emails when his term was up to avoid handing them over.
Who cares? "But the other guys are corrupt too!" is not a great argument for your candidate.
> I didn't see any huge circus or massive outcry about that.
Dude, do you think this is a football game? That scoring a point against your opponent negates points scored against you?
I suspect a big chunk of the people complaining about this would have complained even harder when Bush did it (if what you say is true), if they had been old enough to be aware what was going on, and had social media like we do now.
So, what is your point? How does Bush doing it matter literally at all to whether Clinton should get in trouble?
One other aspect is that expectations change. While it was acceptable to send and receive email in plain text at one point and access email over http, that's likely not the case any longer.
In a fast paced environment, procedures and expectations can be expected to evolve accordingly.
The point I'm making is that I don't think you, or anybody else actually cares about the emails—they care it's something they can criticize Clinton for. Before her, nobody gave a shit. After her, nobody will give a shit. They don't matter, except that they can be used to criticize Clinton. So of course nobody complained about it with Bush, because nobody cares about them.
> I suspect a big chunk of the people complaining about this would have complained even harder when Bush did it (if what you say is true), if they had been old enough to be aware what was going on
They wouldn't have. The rest of us had much bigger complaints to make, that complaining about deleting emails would have been a laughable waste of time.
I served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was held to a high standard in regards to OPSEC and security around classified information. Being as careless or purposely negligent as she was would have gotten me or anyone else court martialed.
Hillary Clinton is a grown ass woman. She knows what she'd doing. She held a position of high responsibility, that deals with highly sensitive intel that impacts many facets of national security, and had an obligation to keep her correspondence secure as well as open to FOIA requests.
That she didn't, and has repeatedly lied about it, should concern everyone. That she was willing to leave her server open to possible hacking simply for personal convenience and gain, should concern everyone. It does me.
How is it just deleting emails? She's literally hiding her tracks and doesn't want people to see what she's talking about. And when caught, she lies and deletes the evidence. I honestly do not understand how someone like you, who ostensibly is lecturing us about simply being rah rah for "our team" can NOT care about this. Honestly how can't you? You are literally telling us not to look at it through the lens of our favored political party. So then don't. How is this defensible?
I'm a little less familiar about previous instances, but if you're referring to Colin Powell's actions.. from what I've read they are no where near the extent to which she used private server for gov't communication.. BUT! I absolutely do not support him doing it either! If he broke a law, he should be prosecuted. I'd be ok with it happening even now.
Do laws and regulations have any meaning anymore if they don't apply to those at the top? We all have our favorites, and surely there is hypocrisy when we like to look the other way when it's "our guy/gal"... next time something like this happens I'll definitely care then too. A big part of it is about what kind of precedent it sets for future politicians. How much more will they hide from the public with no threat of consequences?
He's not talking about Powell's actions, where Powell recommended that Clinton use a private email. He's talking about the Bush administration, who avoided any email controversy on their private email server simply by deleting all 22 million emails.
None of them broke any law, as laid out by Comey, who is famous for bashing heads with politicians. The law was executed by Comey faithfully and there was no crime to prosecute.
Yea that's terrible. If there was evidence of a (possibly) compromised, unsecured personal server, with high level officials talking about national security on it (including Bush) then I would think it would be even worse. But it is bad as is.
Also, I think Bush was a pretty terrible president in many respects and overall I'm not a fan of his.
If he used, or personally signed off on the use of, then he should have been held responsible. As well as others that did so themselves.
And Powell's recommendation that Clinton use a personal server is a perfect example of an arrogant, entitled, self-interested "leader" who only cares about political expediency and convenience for themselves at the expense of destroying government transparency and risking security leaks and hacks.
As a General who above all should know this better than anyone, he's a disgrace for recommending this, in my opinion.
As a General who above all should know this better than anyone, he's a disgrace...
If watching the pundit shows has taught me anything, it's that there are few classes of public figures more venal, hawkish, shameless, or blatantly self-serving than the military brass. It's a miracle they can convince anyone to follow their orders.
Based on nobody criticizing the several prior people in that same position that did the exact same thing.
Sure, if it was just one or two that's one thing, but A email is public in the first place and B when your the fifth person in a row to do something you generally assume that's just how it's done.
On the football game analogy: yes, there are two teams. One of these teams will win. Both teams suck but at the end of the day, most people will want to vote for the person who made the most points.
I am not discussing who you should vote for. I am discussing whether Hillary Clinton is a corrupt person. Those are two different questions.
If Trump[1] is even worse, then sure, vote for Hillary. But that doesn't mean that she's good or that people have to like her.
As an aside: if that were the argument Hillary fans had been making the whole time: "Yeah, we know Hillary is bad and corrupt, but at least she's way better than Trump, so you should vote for her", then I would respect them a lot more.
Instead, it's mostly been a chorus of "OMG, why are you dragging up conspiracy theories about her e-mails! You right-wing simpleton! Go back to Breitbart and argue about lizard people!"
Nothing is more annoying than people being smug when they're actually wrong.
[1]: Trump is Hillary's competition, in case anyone didn't know. Not sure why anyone is still talking about Bush.
Here is the thing. When you are cleared onto a classified project or given access to classified data, you sign several documents in which you accept responsibility for safeguarding our national security by protecting that information. If an employee of Lockheed Martin engaged in similar behavior, e.g. making references to SCI information outside of a SCIF, with only properly cleared personnel they could go to prison. Regardless of the markings she caused SCI information to be transmitted in the clear which shows a certain level of disregard for the policies that are in place to protect us and it would appear that she did so for her own convenience (if you assume the most pure motives). The reader will have to decide if this behavior, while adjudicated as reckless but not criminal is a simple instance of poor judgement by her handlers or indicative of deeper issues with the candidate.
...most people will want to vote for the person who made the most points.
This is true, and baffling. I try to vote as if the process matters, although I'll be the first to admit it's largely a waste of my time. Meanwhile, the morons who loudly declaim the fundamental importance of voting, care only about being "right". SMH.
Honestly, I don't know the applicable laws very well (or at all). This was just an honest question.
Given all the contention over the HRC email thing and specifically over this reddit revelation, I'm not so sure that the situation we have is clearly defined within the laws (otherwise why wouldn't everything be clear cut and decided already?).
What is clear however, is that judging Clinton's mishandling of emails as a crime, when only one person in a hundred years in completely different circumstances has been prosecuted for the same crime, would be unprecedented.
Who should we believe? A writer from Wired Magazine? Or the director of the FBI who is also a lawyer?
There are several distinctions between the Clinton case and the Petraeus case.
* The Clinton case revolved around an unclassified context while the Petraeus case revolved around information taken from a classified context.
* The Clinton case involved data not marked classified (keep in mind emailing New York Times links to someone about about Snowden would be highly classified information), while the Petraeus case involved books that were clearly classified.
* The Clinton case showed no intent while the Petraeus case involved clear intent.
* The Clinton case involved an internal server while the Petraeus case involved open books given to his mistress.
* Clinton cooperated with the FBI while Petraeus intentionally misled the FBI.
Also, reminder that Snowden is a wanted criminal asking for a pardon for leaking 200,000 classified documents to the press, while taking refuge in the state of a geopolitical enemy. He will make scripted media appearances on behalf of Putin [1]. He is not a reliable source.
Unfortunately, every single person that I know, that has a security clearance, can easily punch holes in almost all your points.
My views are based on what I have read and what I have been told by people with, collectively, 100+ years of security clearance holding.
* The Clinton private email server was not cleared for handling classified info. Yet classified information went through it as we now know.
* Some things were marked classified and some were not. This has no bearing on anything however. The onus is on the person who has the clearance to treat and handle all classified information properly regardless of whether it is marked properly or not.
* Clinton's intent: "If they can't, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure."
i.e. take classified info, put into email form and strip the classified markings from it, then send to me.
You and your friends with your 100+ years of security clearance holding are free to have an opinion on Clinton's handling of her private email server.
What you cannot reasonably do, is take the legal opinion of the Director of the FBI, that the Clinton case is different from the Petraeus case, and disagree based on the fact that you have 100+ years of security clearance holding.
I have explained to you key points in James Comey's legal opinion that the Petraeus situation is not applicable to Clinton. I'm sure you're more knowledgeable than I in some area or another, however that doesn't change the fact that the legal position of the FBI has already decided. You can disagree if you want, in the same way people from the internet disagree that climate change exists. I am not interested your vague insinuations.
I am not writing about the narrow issues of Petraeus vs Clinton but about the well known and well understood, by some 6 million current and former security clearance holders, methods and requirements of handling classified info.
Petraeus vs Clinton is a red herring, I didn't mention Petraeus. I was referring to the case of Brian Nishimura.
You linked to an article that only mentioned Petraeus in your previous comment. Regardless, Comey spoke briefly on Nishimura as well so my response is the same.
>federal law doesn’t prohibit the discussion of classified information over unsecured networks."
Seriously? "Oh, man, we sure left a loophole you can drive a truck through! Better update the training materials to make sure clearance holders know this is kosher..."
Sorry, but my prior on this claim is just way too low to casually accept that the analysis, as given in the first link, is plugging the relevant laws into the facts. Classified-material law just doesn't make sense if something like that is legal.
Also, precedence can definitely matter in law sometimes. For instance, if someone does not enforce a patent or a copyright, that can sometimes lead to loss of such patent/copyright protections. Indeed, this isn't all that similar of a situation, but hey, who knows? I'm not a lawyer.
> From the way it reads it looks like he is asking how to bulk remove an email address from the archived messages so when they are turned over they don't contain the redacted email address.
You don't redact email addresses when you are subpoenaed by the f'ing FBI.
edit: My bad, it was the House Select Committee on Benghazi (July 2014). The FBI didn't take custody of the server until August 2015.
“I’ve done quite a bit already in the last few months related to this. Her team had me do a bunch of exports and email filters and cleanup to provide a PST [personal storage file] of all of HRC’s emails to/from any .gov addresses,” Combetta wrote. [0]
Exporting email and filtering it, but only for .gov addresses(?).. I would imagine that whoever subpoenaed those mails was requesting not just .gov communication, and I can't help but think that these sort of actions are suggestive of some deeper cleanup activity.
I don't care much for Hillary or Trump, Democrat or Republican.
I think noting Bush's similar actions does not make Hillary's actions right. The old 'Two wrongs don't make a right' bit here.
There was plenty of anti-Bush press during his term too, so I can't answer to the lack of public outcry specifically on his email doings; perhaps, there was just too much other low-hanging fruit. Although, suspicions were raised blaming the Bush administration for the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated parts of Indonesia and Thailand, and other earthquakes [1,2]. Sure a lot of them are flat-earther types, but you'd be surprised how some of the links I googled on this were just political forums.
What adam12 said -- sure, running a private email server to avoid FOIA is just Bush-level shady (though I'd hope the bar acceptable behavior would be higher than 'Bush did it'). But modifying and deleting evidence to thwart a subpoenae from the FBI is real bad.
Do you really think that they didn't knew a subpoena was coming?
Infact I would bet that they've consulted with a lawyer and this "redaction" was deemed as "shady but not criminal".
Hilary might be "dumb" (as far as IT goes) but she ain't stupid.
If they thought it was going to cause a mess they likely would not have done it in the first place. If the opposition can make something look bad and you don't gain anything from it then what's the point.
Overall this sort of redaction smells like legal advice.
You define the record as the body of the message and archive messages without the headers, or at least without the sender and recipient headers in them.
This might even be a valid interpretation of the US records act.
When asked why you can say this was the archiving policy and you stored the messages as a document and the headers were irrelevant since they did not hold any information.
When asked about who sent or received a specific email that has been redacted you can 'honestly' claim "I do not recall".
Overall this is pretty much exactly the borderline illegal narrative that a good legal counselor would provide in this case.
Of Course that advice was granted based on the premise that there would not be a trail that would make this look premeditated and suspicious.
> The idea that we should be able to immediately read all the correspondence written by any public official also seems silly
Open government is silly? It has been a core aspect of democracy for a long time, and dates back at least to the time of the Enlightenment. People are allowed to have private conversations, but government are held accountable for decisions and the decision process. Transparency allows citizens of a democracy to control their government, reducing government corruption, bribery and other malfeasance. Is that what we are calling silly?
What it should do is encourage public officials to act lawfully and within the trust than citizens has given them. The idea of sealing emails "X years after leaving office" goes directly against the idea of classified documents, since that seal should only be added to information which will harm society and the public that elected the government. Embarrassing or corrupting showing information is not that.
> I assume it would be embarrassing and/or problematic to share the email addresses of various ambassadors and other government officials in public records. You could also read something nefarious into it if you want.
That's what I'm trying to understand here. Was it the case that they were just going to hand over the whole DB regardless, and are trying to keep personal info private (but still, e.g., leave the name so it's clear who's in the conversation)? That's, I suppose, kind of reasonable.
On the other hand, I'm vaguely aware that at least in some cases there's a legal discovery process, where you don't just hand over everything, but do certain searches for "relevant" info and hand over that [0]. Is that true or at all relevant here? That would be quite a bit more nefarious if they were trying to avoid the discovery mining process by changing the email addresses (without flat out deleting the emails). But it seems like instead of doing that why not just delete them?
It's a pretty common tactic, especially in discovery for civil cases. Law firms routinely pay people to type up printed documents so they can be keyword searched.
I agree it should be a matter of contempt of court when clearly used as a delaying tactic.
As a follow up, I found this news article from Time[0], talking about a discovery process:
> Instead, as Clinton revealed Tuesday, her attorneys searched the trove of emails for certain email addresses and subjects. Baron argued that raises the possibility that they missed some emails that should have been saved for the public record.
> First, the lawyers searched all emails with a “.gov” email address in any address field, which yielded 27,500 emails—more than 90% of the total correspondence ultimately provided to State.
Those matching emails were turned over on Dec. 5, 2015 and Combetta posted on July 24, 2015. The optics of trying to change the email addresses ahead of a search by her lawyers for certain email addresses to decide what to turn over are certainly not great.
We don't know the motive, but it seems at least equally plausible that this was in anticipation of responding to a discovery request that filtered on sender/recipient.
> The Bush administration ran private email servers to avoid FOIA requests, then nuked millions of saved emails when his term was up to avoid handing them over.
Citation needed if you're going to "correct the record."
> I didn't see any huge circus or massive outcry about that.
There were just so many things wrong with the Bush administration. I have mad respect for George W, he's a nice guy, and talks a little funny (to a northerner), but some of the things he did just... I don't even know.
The actual facts aside, this makes her appear far less electable, as her campaign camp looks like it's being run by a bunch of clowns.
Just from a PR perspective, this could not have come at a worse time.
The collapse at the 9/11 memorial, the "basket of deplorables", and the mention of the Pepe meme on her official website. Right after a couple of muslim terror attacks, some evidence surfaces purporting that she tried to cover up email indiscretions?
Most people do believe that where there's smoke, there's fire. And this cluster of events can't be good.
> Most people do believe that where there's smoke, there's fire.
Which is why continuously pushing smoke, even when you know there's no fire, is such an effective strategy. How many Benghazi hearings were there, that all came to the same conclusion? But people hear "oh, there's another Benghazi hearing, it must mean something that there's so many!" even though everyone involved knows that it means nothing.
Couple of points -- (1) Colin powell's leaked e-mails apparently called the meetings a circus and a sideshow but also placed blame at the feet of HRC for outcome of that episode. that last bit isn't always quoted in the media.
(2) The leak to the NYT about the server that broke this story appeared has been originated by the Obama administration. They were seeking to clip her wings as whispers about her policy differences with the Obama administration were circulating on Iran. Once HRC became such a sure thing she was inevitable as POTUS it would rended BSO an early lame duck, and on policy in the middle east where the two differ, would create issues for obama establishing a legacy. Obama now has the ability to pardon her (or in the actual turn of events, the Justice granted 'stonetear' limited immunity and killed a looming FBI indictment).
So both of these narratives play into a deeper and more complex game existing in DC than any sound bite or talking point proffered from a PR agency will attest.
Do you have a source for #2? It defies belief, why would Obama clip the wings of his likely democratic successor, knowing that a Republican presidential would endanger Obamacare and several other major achievements of his administration?
> being run by a bunch of criminals who delete incriminating evidence.
I have no problems accepting the fact that politicians might hire crooks to do some things that are extra legal. The fact that they're incompetent criminals who get caught and who don't understand the internet, that worries me.
It might be kind of silly, but I think that the US government has to do a lot of shady things to ensure that we have a high standard of living and more of our share of natural resources.
Look up the origin of the term "banana republic" if you don't believe me. Or just look through how many things we did in South/Central America due to the doctrine of manifest destiny.
So if we have to do something bad to ensure a steady supply of oil at a reasonable price, sure. I can accept that.
But we should be discerning enough to figure out who to hire, and how to GET AWAY WITH IT to avoid repercussions. If you're the president, there's a lot more at stake here than your campaign - we're talking about full blown war.
That's shadiness for the country's benefit you're describing, not shadiness for personal benefit to avoid criminal prosecution so you can get elected president... Shadiness to cover the tracks of previous shadiness to hide your own emails from FOIA requests.
The question here is competence, and lack thereof.
I think that skill in shadiness is transferrable across motives. If you can't plan a robbery of a convenience store for your own wallet, why should I let you plan the robbery of a bank to give it all away to charity?
The ends (sorta) matter in a moralistic sort of way. But the means matter much more. You're playing for higher stakes here, not just criminal prosecution, but a low level brush war in the middle east if you mess things up.
Its the Lil Wayne metric -- be good or be good at it. Every politician is presumably some level of corrupt; you might as well prefer the ones smart enough not to leave evidence everywhere.
Trump really knows how to seize advantage of a weakness.
And remember, he's already primed the pump.
He's labeled Clinton as "crooked" and "lacking stamina" far before all this happened. He must have seen something, cause everything she's done since then has confirmed it.
I think this demonstrates the frailty of a two-party system. If one candidate in the general unexpectedly gets knocked out, the election is all but over.
Granted, the primaries remedy this to an extent, except when you have the unabashed stacking that was employed to counter recent 2012 and 2016 primary campaigns.
Democracy is at its most interactive in the early stages of the election, but the vast majority of people will never leverage that opportunity. People don't act until a media apparatus cues them to cast a vote for its packaged candidate de jour.
He has been successful in business and is now at the helm of one of the most powerful political parties in the known universe. No one has that kind of "luck". There is something more there.
Edit: In response to your edit, she's attacking a cartoon frog. In seriousness.
Not only that, but she's trying to attribute characteristics to that frog that simply aren't any core part of why people post Pepe memes.
All of that questions the sensibilities of her campaign. Basically her campaign is going all out trying to paint Trump as racist, because that's really all they have left at this point, and even that isn't working too well.
Literally the first thing you see visiting her site is an attack that you are forced to join in on, rather than talk of what she's going to do for the country.
"Guy B is bad, elect me." is not as strong an argument as "I can and will do X to improve Y, guy B can't." And you still get to attack in B!
How can I in good conscience vote either party? I would be infinitely amused if everyone without talking about it voted for a third party out of spite and it was a total shock the day after. "Green party, bafflingly, wins election", or whatever.
The problem with third parties is that it is, somehow, a vote for Trump[0] and Hillary[1]. Then there's the "lesser of two evils" fallacy[2] some Hillary supporters use. It's actually sad how people think there's no escape from the two party system.
It's not, though. If you dislike both of them equally, and it doesn't matter to you who wins, and you vote a third party, the difference to you is the same... you just have less on your conscience now because you didn't contribute to a particular side -- and there's the slight, lotto-winning-odds chance that everyone else quietly did the same thing...
The whole point of click-bait ads with fake vote buttons is to entice people with the perception of choice.
Only giving me one option offends my sensibilities, even if I belong to that person's camp. I can't think of a person on earth who enjoys having their autonomy removed.
So at best you've pissed off the people who support you, and at worst you've reinforced the other camp's argument that you're an authoritarian control-freak.
You haven't been paying attention. Yes, pepe was fine, and yes many people who post it do so with no ill intent.
But you are ignoring that people who are proudly racist are openly admitting to using pepe specifically to broaden and popularize explicitly racist ideas. That deserves to have light shown on it.
> But you are ignoring that people who are proudly racist are openly admitting to using pepe specifically to broaden and popularize explicitly racist ideas
You mean like the prominent white supremacists quoted in the article linked to by that expose?
No, I mean people like Richard Spencer, an unashamed white supremacist who believes in segregating by race.
"We live in a society of a great deal of degeneracy, we live in a society in which the fundamental norms are liberal, and we are attempting to fight our way out of that. And sometimes that's going to involve using the means that are at hand. That's going to involve being a part of this fragmented group. That's going to involve dank memes. It's going to involve pepe. It's going to involve unleashing a little chaos". - Richard Spencer at the recent conference of the Alt Right
Willfully ignoring that these people are attempting to get organized, and co-opting whatever gets them traction, is unhelpful at best and dangerous.
> Willfully ignoring that these people are attempting to get organized, and co-opting whatever gets them traction, is unhelpful at best and dangerous.
You've got it backwards. Allowing their words to control your actions gives them power over you.
Are 'dank memes' now racist also just like Pepe?
Imagine instead of 'It's going to involve pepe' he said 'It's going to involve breathing air and drinking water', or some other common and popular thing.
Do you give such idiots the power to control your actions over some common and totally innocuous thing that you might otherwise enjoy or find amusing?
That is called being played for a fool and that is what gets them traction.
What are you talking about? I'm pointing out that they are intentionally using pepe memes to make their ideas seem innocuous. And they get retweeted widely. It's a fact, choose to do what you want with it.
If you want to blow that up into a giant hyperbole that's on you. Making people aware of what is going on doesn't limit anyone's speech or actions.
> I'm pointing out that they are intentionally using pepe memes to make their ideas seem innocuous. And they get retweeted widely. It's a fact, choose to do what you want with it.
The same would be true if they posted Mickey Mouse memes or anything else. To claim Pepe memes by default have any sort of racist undertones (as the Clinton campaign is doing) is false.
> Making people aware of what is going on doesn't limit anyone's speech or actions
Except with that article on Hillary's site, it's not being done to 'make people aware' it's done to brand Pepe as being racist so that when you see regular Trump supporters posting completely innocent Pepe memes (which they do with regularity) it creates the illusion that a large number of Trump supporters are racist (some are I'm sure but the same goes for any group that contains tens of millions of people).
Taking a white-supremacist at his word that Pepe is part of their movement also give them power and notoriety that they wouldn't otherwise have. By 'making people aware' you are giving voice to people who otherwise wouldn't be heard.
Don't believe me? Look at Google Trends for something like 'David Duke'
You can reply, you just need to wait a few minutes - it’s an HN feature to prevent people replying in haste.
I have no political agenda. I’m not from the US, I’m not in the US, I can’t vote in this election. I have no horse in this race. I’m an outsider looking in on the stupidity (on both sides).
I am addressing your points - or at least thought I was. Your point as it appears to me (feel free to correct me if I've misinterpreted you) was ‘we need to make people aware of how these white supremacists are promoting their ideals’.
My point is ‘this has the opposite intent of what you expect and like the Streisand effect, it inadvertently helps promote such ideals and gives these people cultural ground that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to occupy. Giving any sort of import to their ravings, makes them more important than they deserve to be, and gives them a degree of control over your actions.'
> this has the opposite intent of what you expect and like the Streisand effect
They are promoting it themselves, loudly, and trying to inject their ideas into mainstream political discourse. I see no problem in calling for people to reject it, and helping them identify them. You can look into american history and see that we have been through cycles like this before (example the 'Know Nothings' against the catholics).
I have myself clearly seen more speech in favor of segregation ("we just weren't meant to mix together") on many sites (reddit, facebook comments on congressman pages, etc). I can give you links to explicitly racist sites where they talk about organizing on popular websites to change discourse. You argue I'm giving them the Streisand effect, but we are already too late. They are here, people need to be aware today. These people intentionally prey on those who are susceptible and angry.
I have two (former) friends who have tried talking to me about how "cultural marxism is destroying western values" and that every muslim has evil in their hearts. They weren't always like this.
They don't deserve to be important, instead of ignoring them people need to be willing to say that this is unacceptable and their ideas are not welcome.
> They don't deserve to be important, instead of ignoring them people need to be willing to say that this is unacceptable and their ideas are not welcome.
Which is a better way to show someone that they are not important:
* Ignoring them
* Giving their views countless press in order to discredit them
I agree that calling out racism is important, but when it's just people spouting nonsense in their own little corner of the Internet why give that any attention.
> They are promoting it themselves, loudly, and trying to inject their ideas into mainstream political discourse
Something they have been trying to do since basically forever. However they can only successfully inject themselves when other people allow it.
Have a look at this basic timeline:
Internet: Pepe the frog is fun
Racists: Pepe the frog now belongs to us
Internet: Nah, Pepe's not racist.
Clinton: Pepe the frog belongs to racists
Internet: Nah, Pepe's not racist.
Question: In this scenario, who gave racists control of Pepe the frog and who allowed racists to inject themselves in to this part of mainstream culture? (Hint: it was not the racists and it was not the Internet).
> I can give you links to explicitly racist sites
This is exactly what I was talking about. In your fervor to show how horrible these people are, you are willing to promote these sites yourself...
I don't care for those sites any more than I care for sites promoting flat-earth science and/or UFOs. I know they exist, but I ignore them completely, which is exactly the attention they deserve.
You are wrongly characterizing what I am saying. Maybe try reading my original post again? People can only "allow" them to inject themselves into discourse when they have full consent, ie what their agenda is. Ignoring them doesn't silence them, nor makes it clear that their ideas are not acceptable.
Did I give you any links? I indicated that they are there and it is explicit and obvious.
If you cannot handle that a meme is ALSO (which means NOT ENTIRELY ie they dont own it) by people with a racist agenda then I frankly don't know what to say. The above people asked for proof, I gave it to them. Deal with the facts.
I'm not going to stop pointing out the tactics of white supremacists to inject themselves in mainstream culture.
> But you are ignoring that people who are proudly racist are openly admitting to using pepe specifically to broaden and popularize explicitly racist ideas
Yes. I am ignoring such people, because such tactics don't merit anything more. I would also ignore them if they claimed to be using Mickey Mouse or any other broadly popular icon to promote their ideas.
Because it deserves nothing more than a rolling of my eyes.
What I will call out is people (like the Clinton campaign) accepting or validating the idea that Pepe is somehow a racist, nazi frog.
> If you cannot handle that a meme is ALSO (which means NOT ENTIRELY ie they dont own it) by people with a racist agenda then I frankly don't know what to say
I can handle it fine. It's the Clinton campaign (and surrogates) that are trying to actively associate Pepe as a symbol of racism and that's what I object to.
I think this conversation has reached the point where it is only going to go round in circles, so I'm bowing out now. Please enjoy the rest of your day.
This is exactly my problem with the Clinton campaign article about Pepe being a white nationalist symbol. I found that article troubling because first, it reads like satire and I am legitimately frightened that this is what a major presidential candidate views as political discourse in this country, and second because it so unequivocally casts Pepe as racist symbolism, which is completely false. There is no nuance whatsoever in that article, which increasingly seems like standard procedure in politics on both sides of the aisle. Nuance and deep understanding seem to have completely disappeared from politics, everything is black or white, good or evil.
I'm writing this on my computer and I have an entire folder on my desktop filled with rare Pepes that I've collected over the years. I'm not a white nationalist and up until last week I had a Pepe sticker on my backpack that I carry with me everywhere. When I saw this article gaining mainstream attention I immediately took the sticker off. I have enough things to deal with in life to not want to worry about being called a racist because of my Pepe sticker. Now, I understand there are much greater injustices in the country to deal with than this, but this is yet another example of politicians using these kind of binary arguments that end up making serious discourse impossible.
2. > I can handle it fine. It's the Clinton campaign (and surrogates) that are trying to actively associate Pepe as a symbol of racism and that's what I object to.
People promoting racism are doing this, you want to stay willfully ignorant about it.
In the opinion of an anonymous Donald Trump troll account. Not really lending much credibility there. Not surprised you can't defend for your own agenda though.
Does it? What does it prove? Why does shining the spotlight on self-proclaimed Internet racists actually accomplish? Especially seeing as how much of the racism seems to mostly be in service of attention-seeking?
What do you get out of proving that self-proclaimed racists [do x], as a small subset of people who [do x]?
Not self proclaimed internet racists, we're talking about white nationalists and race segregationists like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor discussing Pepe as a way to "speak truth to power".
I just find the whole "attack others without any mention of myself" thing to be so... Off putting.
It's sad that it's so common, and scary effective. I just wish that it wasn't this way and that things like attack ads would at least include some info on how the candidate is different/better than the one they are attacking.
The sad truth is that I believe many of the same things as one of the major candidates, and when looking at the issues I do agree with some from the other, but the way they almost entirely ignore the issues and spend most of their time attacking others doesn't fill me with confidence that either one wont just bring that toxicity into an already toxic and gridlocked political system.
Yelling half-truths and over exaggerating the "enemy" isn't going to help the country at all. And IMO that stuff has no place on the offical website of a candidate.
The actual reason for all of this is because both major American political parties have discovered, as many corporations have over the past few years, that the only thing that matters when it comes to persuasion is appeals to one's identity and emotions directly. As it turns out, people don't give a crap about logic, reason, facts, deduction... our day-to-day lives are complex enough as it is, only a few of us can actually afford the time to research all of the media's claims, and thus, reactionary, controversial, attention-grabbing headlines (not full articles, who reads those anyways?) dictate what people believe is the truth.
So yeah, you and I look at that modal popup and think, "ew gross, why are you trying THIS hard to shove this negative image of your opponent down my throat, before I can even see a single fact about you and your campaign?", but I can totally see why they would do such a thing. People are very susceptible to being persuaded by these strong emotional accusations—it seems to me that the dialog is saying, "hey, you're not one of those filthy TRUMP supporters, ARE YOU? If not, prove it by clicking this button below." I believe that such a persuasive device is far more effective than either of us can imagine.
A more cynical view is that they keep hammering it home because Trump's outreach to black voters is working enough that it has become electorally significant [0].
Polls show he currently has historically high support among black voters - and not just for himself, but out of any Republican candidate over the last few decades [1], and it's high enough that it could tip the election.
That's unlikely. The LATimes tracking poll is known to be unorthodox in its methodology, it's meant to track fluctuations in support more than actual support. Trump has not broken ~6% in any other swing state polls or national polls that I've seen, sometimes he's in 4th place behind Johnson and Stein.
As it turns out, delegitimizing and spreading conspiracy theories about a wildly popular president in a community does not make people in a community fans of you.
Most analysts don't think the outreach was targeted at black voters at all, but rather white moderates, who are more persuadable and numerous in number.
This seems akin to feigned disbelief - you know the answers to these questions but are pretending not to. I'll bite anyway!
> Who is this? How can I tell who of my neighbors is in this group?
People who espouse beliefs far away from the median belief in the society. You can tell by taking to them about their beliefs, or often in my experience by having them talk at you about them or by looking at bumper stickers and flags they display, and then comparing the beliefs they espouse to your intuition of what the median belief is. Of course everyone's intuition of that is based on the people they themselves know, so "the fringe" ends up defined differently for different people. This can be controlled a bit by reading or being exposed to summaries of reports of society-wide studies, like polls and surveys. This is what the news should help with, but unfortunately people tend to choose news from inside the same bubble as all the people they know, so that doesn't work that well either.
> Having made that determination, how should I treat those neighbors?
With the same kindness you treat everyone else, but without having to agree (or pretend to agree) with our have any respect for their views. You "hate the sin, not the sinner".
Thanks for making the effort, but this definition is problematic in several respects. First of all, Trump is only a bit behind Clinton in the polls now, so either OP is wrong about Trump's supporters being those, as you put it, "far away from the median" (we typically call this "long tail") or the variance is much higher than any rational observer could believe. 538 gives Trump an 88.5% chance of winning the state where I live. The median voter here is a Trumpet.
Second, the proposed method of making this identification is entirely subjective. I'm planning to vote either Green or Libertarian this election, because I oppose war, prohibition, and other travesties of the status quo. On the topics of most concern to me, I literally can't tell the difference between Clinton supporters and Trump supporters. How can I determine whose "sins" I should "hate"? Perhaps I should hate my own sins, even though they couldn't possibly be of support to Trump? This is quite disturbing to me, and the principle of charity had previously ruled out this reading of OP.
With the same kindness you treat everyone else, but without having to agree (or pretend to agree) with our have any respect for their views. You "hate the sin, not the sinner".
Incidentally, if any particular campaign takes this particular idiotic rhetorical stance, and then loses, and then wonders why? They'll be able to blame this particular idiotic rhetorical stance. In order to convince people of anything, one must speak with fluency in the people's terms. Your use of "sin" here would not be considered idiomatic by any Trump supporter I know.
I shouldn't have included it at all for this exact reason, but the quote about "sin" and "sinners" is an aphorism that is meant to be interpreted metaphorically, not literally. It just means that you can respect people without needing to respect all of their opinions.
Like I pointed out in my comment, "fringe" is definitely subjective, but there are also some objective measures, but they are also fraught for various reasons (which I went into a bit in my comment).
The claim (which, I'm not making, but others are) is that the Trump campaign has attracted more of "the fringe", not that all his supporters are of "the fringe". It's very possible to have both "mainstream" and "fringe" support.
("Indict" means to charge with a crime. "Indite" is an archaic synonym for "invite". The joke I make about this confusion of terms originates with Shakespeare, so I think "indite" must be pretty archaic indeed!)
It's an old unverified post on reddit being reviewed by republicans in the House of Representatives. Has everyone gone mad? We are literally paying our representatives to waste time reading Reddit based on a tenuous connection and some miniscule hope that it some how someday leads to FINALLY exposing the CORRUPT Hillary, or even better, hurting her chances of winning the presidency. Even if this were illegal, everything could be done with the best intentions and primarily legal concordance just like the email scandal, and STILL House Republicans would investigate it as if it were a war crime. Taxpayer money is being wasted on this bullshit, and yet these dipwads keep being reelected. THAT is the fire.
In this period of great economic uncertainty, a billionaire real estate tycoon and media mogul with no political experience, inflammatory rhetoric, and awful, authoritarian policy proposals is a serious contender for the most powerful office in the world, I'd say we have bigger problems to worry about tHan anything Hillary may have done. Our economy, livelihood, and potentially our freedom is at stake under this threat. Trump is a true menace to society and we are treating any little flaw shown by Hillary as villainy in the highest order. It's baffling, and terrifying.
In short, I'd take Crooked Hillary over Tyrant Trump any day.
I happen to believe that facts are important in a Presidential race.
Essentially your response is repeating talking points of the Trump campaign... which is OK, 1st amendment and all that but to pretend like you're making a constructive addition to the discussion / debate is folly.
Right now America has a choice between Trump, a racist, mysoginist demagogue who has never held a public office and Hillary Clinton. Hillary may have issues but she is also possibly the most experienced presidential candidate of the last couple of decades.
> the most experienced presidential candidate of the last couple of decades
George H. W. Bush was a two term vice president, director of the CIA, etc.
I've been following this election pretty closely for more than a year, and I seriously couldn't tell you what Clinton's positive message is besides "I'm experienced". Nobody cares. Americans don't elect technocratic planks of wood. This is the worst, most inept presidental campaign I've ever seen. She's very nearly losing to a joke candidate.
Since when is a long tenancy in a public office a good thing? What happened to strong morality and doing the right thing when nobody is looking? Hillary broke the law [0], plain and simple, and she isn't being punished because well, she is a powerful life-long politician with many friends in high places. At least Nixon had the moral decency to resign when it was clear he wasn't right to lead by example. The simple truth is she is a leftist, a globalist, and for those reason alone she'll get a lot of votes but unfortunately being those things in America today means nothing that else matters. Basic morality? flawed candidate. Broke the law? She had a good reason? Poor health? Doesn't matter, she has a capable leftist/globalist to take her place, we just need to get another D in the white house.
>At least Nixon had the moral decency to resign when it was clear he wasn't right to lead by example.
Yes, it was because Nixon had moral fiber. Not because he negotiated a deal with Ford to pardon him immediately and preemptively, thus saving him the humiliation of impeachment and legal repercussions.
I'm sure you're absolutely right. If he hadn't been such a snake he would have just fought the system, used his ample government connections to ensure he won't get prosecuted. The people would understand, he was just acting in those good intentions of advancing the desires of the party, after all.
Nixon was 100 percent going to be impeached if he did not resign. He had very little sway in the Republican Party by the time the tapes came out. He ran an incredibly secretive and paranoid White House that was mostly disconnected from the Senate and made many enemies even in his own party.
"Hillary may have issues but she is also possibly the most experienced presidential candidate of the last couple of decades."
s/Trump/Clinton/ and your statement: "Essentially your response is repeating talking points of the Trump campaign."
serves as a valid critique of your own response.
-
Qualified for not, Clinton's corruption has been confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt over the course of many leaks and scandals. Democrats who continue to support her are just as blindly partisan as Republicans.
The whole system is broken. I won't be voting for anyone.
At least vote. Write in your dog, if you have to. Otherwise future politicians won't aware that you will be at the poll, ready to vote for them, and they'll pander to someone else.
Curious, do you have a handful of racist Trump quotes? Not stuff about illegals, but actual racist stuff (like not wanting to rent to blacks or something)?
Trump aside, electing someone that's openly corrupt (DNC Wikileaks show they went against Bernie, against rules) seems to be far more dangerous to the future of the US and worldwide democracy. Up until now, corruption was sort of assumed, but if a publicly corrupt candidate wins, it just shows "crime pays".
'"Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day." (Trump called the things written about him in the book "probably true.")'
Also Trump was the President of the Trump organization when the DOJ fined the company for illegal housing discrimination, doing things like marking the lease applications of African Americans with a 'C' for 'Colored' so that they would know not to rent to them.
Technically it is a reference only to Orthodox Jews, who wear their yarmulkes to work.
Secular (non-religious or atheist or whatever) and Reform (not sure about Conservative, but I think they don't wear yarmulkes to work) Jews wouldn't be included.
I know both Jews who would laugh and those who would be offended by it.
If you really cannot understand how stereotyping an entire ethnicity as short money-counters is offensive, you are far beyond help. I should have figured that from the start.
It depresses me that such retrograde, Nazi-level antisemitism is tolerated on Hacker News.
As a Jew, I am offended. And I'm the group who that statement is supposed to "flatter." Think of the Black accountants who Trump apparently thinks are incompetent purely due to the color of their skin. This shit belongs in the 1940s, not 2016.
The person that said the quote about which financial people he wants has Jewish grandkids. I hardly think that is "Nazi level" and I don't mind having my comment up.
It's not "undocumented immigrants", it's "illegal immigrants".
If you enforce the law, they should be deported. Now they probably have very good reasons for immigrating, but the fact remains that they broke the law and our borders, and the job of the executive branch is to enforce the laws.
This claim cain only be made by somebody ignorant of the history of racism: racism almost always lives with a non-racist pretext. Here are a couple of examples, though many more exist:
Lynchings were instigated by an accusation of a crime - the perpetrators could claim they weren't racist, they were just keeping their communities safe! [1]
Japanese internment too had a non-racist pretext: people of Japanese descent were claimed to be disloyal citizens with greater allegiance to Japan (even after being born in the USA or becoming naturalized) than the USA. [2]
We know that the debate about undocumented immigrants isn't about to Europeans who overstay their tourist visas or Canadians sneaking across the border: it is about a single ethnic group (hispanic) who have come across the Mexican border. This means that 'undocumented' can easily be a euphemism for 'hispanic', allowing people to shift racist statements into ostensibly non-racist ones. While not all discussions of undocumented immigrants are racist, some certainly are a form of dog whistle [3]
First, the two examples of racism you point out are decades old. Try to pay attention to current events.
We share a long, fairly badly secured land border with a country with significantly worse living and earning conditions than we enjoy. The fact that all those people trying to come to a better life share an ethnicity is not relevant at all.
If you want to see racism, see how British people treat Polish immigrants, even though the Poles have every right in the world to be there.
Are there a ton of EU overstays causing noticeable impact? Do you think if millions of Russians were illegally in the US working low-end jobs (for the most part) and being rather highly visible (flying Russian flags at protests) it'd be waved off?
>“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
It's pretty racist to attack a whole contingent of people and make broad negative generalizations about them and qualify with a half-hearted caveat that 'some' are good people. He's quite clearly drawing a line between "you" (the white audience he was speaking to) and the Other (i.e. the Mexicans) personified as rapists and drug dealers.
Sounded like it was clearly "you" as legal Mexicans and other immigrants. The rest of the sentence is about illegals -- he's not, afaik, made any claims about Mexicans in general. If he was actually making a racist statement, then immigration status wouldn't matter.
"You" clearly haven't even read or seen the speech and are talking completely out of your ass. It was one of his opening talking points in his presidential announcement in New York City to his cronies - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06...
It's pretty straightforward xenophobic, hyper jingoist nationalist rhetoric. You = us good Americans. They = the Other. He uses the car industry for Japan, a conservative talking point since the 80s. For Mexico he harps on immigration and calls them rapists. It's aggregate and subjectivity-denying. It's racist and dumb.
I saw it, way back when he spoke. "They're not sending you" never occurred to me as "you, Americans". That'd uh, make no sense: Mexico is not a significant source of Americans immigrating to America.
At any rate, it's still besides the point. He's accurate in saying that people coming in illegally aren't "the best". If you're a top professional you're not going to risk illegal immigration anywhere, generally speaking. This lines up with my and others' personal experience (I lived in Central America for nearly 2 decades).
> "They're not sending you" never occurred to me as "you, Americans". That'd uh, make no sense: Mexico is not a significant source of Americans immigrating to America.
He's talking to a roomful of Americans mentioning how America (referred to as us, you) is being beaten by other countries (they). It's pretty obvious. Just because it doesn't make any sense doesn't negate what Trump was implying - it's not like he's known for sound logical reasoning or even being able to approximate a grain of truth. If you seriously think he was referring to "legal Mexicans" in that speech (again, to a roomful of his white cronies in Midtown NYC) then I got a brooklyn bridge to sell you.
>At any rate, it's still besides the point. He's accurate in saying that people coming in illegally aren't "the best".
Is he accurate in saying that Mexicans only care about "beating" us at the border and that they are mostly rapists with only some, he "assumes", are good people? Come on.
Incorrect. He wants to end the H1B visa program (despite the fact that he uses for seasonal work at his club in Florida) and he does not want to accept political refugees attempting to come to the US legally.
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I may well be, but I'm under the impression that a significant number of posters on HN have problems with the H1B visa program. I'm not particularly knowledgable on the subject but from the comments I've read most of the concern centers around driving down wages, and thus costs for employers, and shackling H1B visa holders to specific jobs.
Is this an incorrect reading of the sentiment here? And more importantly, should I assume that anyone against the H1B program feels so because of racial animus?
I should have been more clear when I referenced H1B. My personal opinion about the program is that it is deeply flawed, mostly because it is a sort of legalized indentured servitude.
I doubt Trump has those same feelings however, as he hires H1B works at his own club in Palm Beach instead of Americans. If he was morally opposed to the program, I doubt he would do that.
I brought it up because he talks about it in a way to scapegoat foreigners, appealing to the darker angels of people who have racist tendencies and are looking for someone to blame. I find such a tactic reprehensible, and I personally do not draw a distinction between someone who acts on racist feelings and someone who makes racist appeals to those who act on racist feelings.
Thanks for the response. I agree with you that at best Trump seems hypocritical to denounce the H1B visa program after having employed those holding H1B visas, and at worst much more nefarious for using those immigrants as scapegoats. At the same time, my main concern with your original comment was that you used his stance on the H1B program as an example of his racism. Now, in Trump's case that very well may be true, but by using his stand against H1B's as your reasoning you basically imply that anyone against the H1B program is also racist. I understand that wasn't what you meant to imply but it highlights to me one of the dangers of the current political climate. Namely, a person might have a specific stance on an issue based on very legitimate reasoning, in this case the H1B program being indentured servitude, and if someone else comes along who happens to hold those same views for perhaps less legitimate reasons, lets say racism, we tend to automatically discount the stance as being racist or otherwise illegitimate.
Being labelled a racist is a pretty serious charge for most people who don't have wealth or power and actually have to live and work with a diverse group of people. I would hate to be called a racist due to being against the current way the H1B program is administered just because Trump is against it as well.
Again, I'm sure that's not actually what you meant, but it points to the importance of using very clear language when leveling these kind of accusations.
I think the H1B program is terribly flawed and certainly abused. But Trump is not talking about reforming it, he only talks about in the context of "foreigners stealing our jobs" (paraphrase), which I find quite contemptible. And without a meaningful plan to replace it would close an avenue for people to legally immigrate to the US, which makes it seem like he might have a problem with legal immigrants.
Why is "foreigners stealing our jobs" contemptible? Assuming H1B is abused (I understand this can be in dispute), why should a candidate for a country not want to help its own citizens?
I think this is a big part of why the SV powerhouses are mobilizing against Trump. They rally the troops with hyperbole and accusations of racism and sexism, but in private they're afraid of losing their H1B wage slaves and tax havens.
Hillary is far, far more deserving of that label than Trump. To campaign and donate millions of dollars on her behalf requires ignorance, a seriously twisted moral compass, or some financial and political incentives that you don't want to talk about.
She's spent her life struggling to help children and single parents. Donations fund her charity that has helped millions worldwide. To twist that into something bad is just more of the political smokescreen that plagues any woman in public office.
She moved to New York just so she could run for senator.
She and Bill also spent 3 million dollars on her daughter's wedding. Where did she come up with that money, considering that a President's salary is in the mid six figures?
Oh that's right, she (and Bill) get quarter million dollar speaking fees at Goldman Sachs.
What part of all that would not be reprehensible if she were a man, and if she were a man, wouldn't this all be dug up and thrown into his/her face if you were running for president?
How is pointing out moral turpitude a "political smokescreen that plagues every woman in public office"?
Great list: Like any number of men get away with and no comment. None of that is reprehensible; that is all business as usual. A good fraction of our Senators are 'carpet baggers', not been brought up before. Loyalty to a spouse is lauded if its a man being loyal. #2 speaking fees is George Bush but nobody brought him up. And 'linked to' is another smokescreen catchphrase, slings mud without having to show any real problem.
Yes, and none of those men are currently running for president.
If a man did all these things, and were running for POTUS, they'd get raked over the coals, just like Clinton is. What's your point?
Also, Clinton has made it a point to argue for "the right to be believed" for sexual assault victims. And she went to bat for her husband before that statement to cast doubt on his accusers? http://nypost.com/2016/08/15/hillarys-site-edits-sexual-assa...
What a two-faced person who should not be president.
I don't see quotes on that page, just a few opening paragraphs and "Loading..." where I'd expect content to be. The opening paragraph is has a misquote/misstatement of its own so I'm a bit suspicious. The linked articles from the opening are also all-headline, little substance.
I don't mean this as a defence of Trump, but people seem to read into statements to determine his racism/bigotry/whatever. AFAIK he has not technically made a racist statement in any of his campaigning, for instance.
I see that you're having a bit of trouble parsing my statements. Allow me to help.
>but to pretend like you're making a constructive addition to the discussion / debate is folly.
That's silly. I'm just saying that all these things happened. Facts, if you will. These things definitely happened and were reported ad nauseum. The terror attacks, Clinton passing out, her basket of deplorables comment, those actually happened. And now this email thing.
These were Trump talking points long before the events happened.
Now, I think that her campaign staff could somehow spin this so that she comes out relatively unscathed, IF all these things didn't happen within about a week of each other. If this was spaced out over a month or so, we'd forget.
The way the timing is, no spin doctor in the world can buff this out.
I'm not advocating for either candidate, like you are, but I'm pointing out the fact that Clinton has pretty much made herself unelectable.
One of several archived copies of the r/exchangeserver thread, "Remove or replace to/from address on archived emails?" (the user stonetear deleted his account during the r/conspiracy thread): http://archive.is/FXcao
Actually, it started at /r/the_donald, but was promptly removed for violating reddit's doxxing policy.
Since then it's been spammed in a variety of low traffic subreddits in an effort to make it relevant news.
Personally, I find it had to trust anything that comes out of reddit's political forums, as they are incredibly unreliable sources of information. (this included)
The /r/exchangeserver communities top post of all time as of yesterday had 50 upvotes. The top post from 2 years ago had 25 and 13 comments. But somehow I'm supposed to believe that the best technical resource this guy could think of when faced with this investigation was reddit? Umm... No. I don't believe it for a second.
Regardless of your politics or beliefs of what happened, I think a simple bit of advice is truth:
If you are going to run an e-mail server in difficult circumstances then hire a System Administrator who does not need to post obviously problematic questions to Reddit.
And this is why the NSA collecting all data on everyone should have people worried. Sure, it's just pictures of your cat and 'my life is boring, they can spy on me all they want because they won't find anything interesting"
And then 2 years later your post on an internet forums about your missing dog helps tie you the destruction of evidence.
The point is that even if you are posting innocuous things, it builds up a profile that can identify you in ways you do not expect. This example was for something serious.
I highly recommend that many others use FOIA to gather communication records of their elected officials.
About a month ago I received this pdf [1] (1700+ pages of email records) of Chicago's office of the mayor after about three months of resistance. Prior to that, it took a year and a half and a law suit to receive one week's worth of Chicago's mayor's logs [2] through Chicago's IT department. To my knowledge, prior to this work, records in volume have been impossible to get due to asinine rejections. The amount or resistance (and holy shit was there a lot) led me to run several chains of FOIA requests to gather bulk communication records.
Of note in the call records are many private investigator calls. I haven't had much chance to go through the email records and could use some help if anybody's interested.
What amazes me besides him using familiar handle is that even after the investigation he left all those reddit posts up. Then he decides to try and delete them now after they are found.
I'm guessing that a person who asks this kind of "help-me-cover-something-up" question while mentioning that his client is "VERY VIP" is also completely oblivious of how findable things are on today's Internet. I'm guessing the Internet detective work might have come from something very serendipitous and casual: Someone interested in the email server scandal doing a search for "Paul Cambetta", which is a fairly rare name, and landing upon his Etsy page with the also unusual handle of "stonetear", and then googling that and finding his Reddit account.
Hey may not have viewed his actions as being a big deal - like, it's possible that they're not a big deal, outside of political hay-making.
There's nothing in the thread to suggest he's trying to conceal anything meaningful in terms of the content of the correspondence. Presumably the "how does I delete sexy snapchats to the Saudis" thread was done more discretely.
Thats not true. The reddit thread explicitly states what he wants to do is legally and ethically problematic. And it spells out why. "That is why the functionality doesn exist in exhcange" was the sort of end result of the larger logic here.
Yes the thread says that, but they are wrong. No lawyer in the world thinks that Microsoft Exchange is some sort of legal chain of custody or inviolable vault of perfect information.
The reason Exchange does not have the functionality to redact email address is that people who need to redact information usually prefer to do it by hand, so it would be a waste of Microsoft's time to build a utility to do it.
But to think that an Exchange DB can't be altered... I mean, if you have root on a machine you can do anything you want to the information on it. And yes, the legal world knows that.
Notwithstanding your good points about it not being fool-proof, it is an important point that your email software doesn't essentially promote or enable corruption of the meta data in the way you describe.
As a business person, nobody would [buy/use] exchange if it was not reasonably secure from an audit trail perspective. The intergrity of the communications is required for many business's who have record retention policy and what not.
Think about an analogy for a bank's accounting system that allowed audit trails to be compromised. Its a huge problem for the purchasing people and the managerial layer that has to sign off on sarbox etc.
Exchange by itself is absolutely not secure from an audit trail perspective[1]. I've specifically had this come up where an employee edited an e-mail to try and CYA.
Even if you are using journalling, an administrator can open the journal mailbox and edit messages. If you want/need a reasonably secure audit trail, you need a 3rd party product in addition to Exchange.
The combo of Active Directory + Exchange gives system administrators a lot of power to use permissions to limit who can alter or destroy critical data. But obviously someone has to be the master admin, and that person's power can't be limited by software.
Technological audit trails are trustworthy only to the extent that the admins running them are trusted.
People really should learn to not reuse usernames. Unique password per site, and unique name as well. This won't protect anyone from government agents, but it will make it harder for an Internet mob to determine your identity.
I was initially confused as to how the FBI were able to track that StackOverflow post in which Ulbricht changed the appearance of his account name...that wouldn't show up in the public edit log for a question, right?
Then reading through the complaint, it seems like Ulbricht was undone by registering on Stack Overflow using his GMail account, which the FBI had tracked his Comcast IP to (didn't hurt that the gmail address was his real name), and then asked StackOverflow for the records relating to that GMail address: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/801103-172770276-ulb...
sidenote: The Slate article links to the complaint on Scribd, and now it's deleted from Scribd for some reason.
I use 'redblacktree' everywhere, but I'm very aware that it's public and traceable to my real-life identity. (though, there are unfortunately a few sites where someone else took the name... Notably Twitter)
Same boat here. I've been using "mindcrime" (and variations of that) regularly since about 1998 or so, and that's my username on many popular services (here, Twitter, GitHub, etc.) And it's trivially easy to link it to my real identify. shrug It's not something I consider a big deal. If I ever decide to do something nefarious, I'll create a new username.
Yeah but he was already granted immunity to testify to the FBI, so if he wanted to expose her legally, he had his chance. And he was no longer in charge of handling Clinton's email at that point anyway.
Deleting them now is just stupid panic. They've been found, they've been archived, they've been reported. The only thing deleting them does is make him look guilty as hell even if he's done nothing wrong at all.
100 million people (or a handful, whatever) who don't have to worry about Bill Clinton and various other powerful figured pressuring them into compliance.
You can believe that, against all odds, Bill really did just talk to Loretta Lynch about grandkids. Even so, the point was still made.
100 million people faffing about vs 6 full time guys who are presumably professionals in the field?
Some of the "people faffing about" are probably also professionals and some of them are probably better than the people employed by the FBI. I mean, yeah, there are plenty of dumbasses on Reddit, but there are people who really Know Their Shit as well.
I'm not sure how motivated the FBI really was to find anything. You start looking too hard and I'm certain you'd turn up a lot of dirt in some very inconvenient places, at all points on the political spectrum.
I have not seen this reported on by any major US news media. (FOX, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS) Other than The Hill, US News, various right-wing sources, and VICE I don't see anyone writing about this. It reminds me of the first hour or two after Hillary's episode at the 9/11 event where the only major news source reporting was Fox News.
Is this something people are interested in? Is there an obligation to report on this nationally?
I am getting even unhappier with the democratic national committee ranking members who did what they could to sabotage Sander's run for the nomination. Just my opinion, but as a democrat I think Sanders would have such an easier time winning the general election. I would like to see a major magazine do a "public shaming" article on the leading DNC actors who acted unfairly and non-ethically. I would like history to trash these people because they deserve it.
This is interesting. I was up drinking beer with a friend until 5am this morning talking about the very phenomenon of breaking news coming from social media and sites such as Reddit. He pointed to the Boston bombing and Dallas shooter situations as reasons why the press should "just ignore" social media; his entire argument boiled down to 'bad data exists along side good data, therefore throw it all out"
I didn't necessarily disagree that there are moments where we got it wrong, for sure. I tried arguing that using those events as a point of reference for insulating journalism a bit better was probably a good idea; you know "first step to overcoming a problem is admitting you have one" and he was having none of it. Maybe this story will do the trick.
Really curious to see where this goes taking some points from that debate.
The Boston Marathon bombing fiasco was the result of reddit trying to deduce stuff in the real world based on photos and video and the like. This is reddit trying to deduce information based on reddit posts, on reddit. I think that's an important distinction.
I think so too, and that's a distinction that I tried in our debate to bring up. Broadly, my entire argument was around the use of social media, or at least the existence of social media bringing many new points of reference when looking at historical events in ways we didn't have before, and that if one wanted to, they could go and mine tweets, shares, likes, reddit posts from a fixed point in time and look at sentiment.
Well, because some sentiments were wrong (in his opinion because people like Kim Kardashian are allowed to tweet), the whole notion needed to be thrown out.
So I agree, it's an important distinction-though that distinction is inherently part of the "riddle" so-to-speak.
I don't have a real conclusion to offer, but I'd like to suggest that his argument might be a tad more nuanced than that.
The claim may not just be that bad data is mixed in with the good. It might rather be that we can't verify sources and facts on social media effectively. In other words, I question the assumption that traditional journalistic methods are effective when examining social media.
To be clear: I haven't formed an opinion on this. Thanks for the thought-provoking question, in any case.
It might rather be that we can't verify sources and facts on social media effectively.
Believe me when I say we went down that rabbit hole as well. I even asked if perhaps there was something to the notion as to the unreliability of sources on social media and if that was the case, how do we create incentives for or otherwise insulate journalism beyond the baked-in expectation that journalists will perform with more earnest intent to disseminate to verify and seek out sources. We expect a journalist to dig for qualitative sources; we expect integrity; what do we do when that doesn't happen? What's next?
He directly said "We ignore it. We ignore the problem and it will stop being one". I couldn't find a way to agree with that, I tried providing a subsequent argument that if there were a problem with social media mucking a story-where was the inherent problem in pointing to a fixed point in time where it happened (using examples he offered to the debate) as a means of understanding what went wrong in the process, and working to do better. That didn't get far. Trust me, I was there.
At the end of the day, I had to rest the argument because he just didn't think social media had any bearing for journalists, and I had to try even harder to avoid saying things that were just plain rude after my position was continuously mischaracterized and parroted back as ideological soundbytes.
Still, I think it's a critical conversation the journalism world ought to be having, and I don't think "Well just tell journalists to ignore social media" will solve that.
There is not really any news here, although the House GOP will once again spin up the PR machine over this.
Redacting the characters of an email address is almost certainly not illegal; in fact both State and the FBI regularly do this themselves when releasing emails.
So, I don't think this is much of a win in the social media saves the world column.
"The Reddit message was sent on July 23, 2014, according to an archive of the page saved by other users. The day before, the Benghazi Committee had reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of related records"
Even with proof, nothing will come of this. Sadly it seems the rules are different for anyone in power to get away with questionable choices and decisions. It has to be more than coincidental that Hillary Clinton has this much controversy surrounding her, some might say it's just conspiracy theory fodder, but let's be honest: she has obviously done some shady things, to the point where they can't even be adequately covered up anymore.
I don't want Clinton or Trump to be the next POTUS. I think they're both inadequate for the position.
"Combetta appeared under subpoena in a committee hearing last week on the alleged destruction of evidence, but both he and colleague Bill Thornton exercised their Fifth Amendment right not to testify."
Actually it's the Fifth Amendment protection against self incrimination.
You mean your moderating servants? At the time, there were multiple posts of the same story competing for attention, so a mod marked all but one as a dupe. But then that surviving one got heavily flagged. We reduced them at one point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12534542) but the flags kept coming.
I think what's going on here (and what I just told the other moderators) is that this is one of those times when our standard practices around things like dupes and downweights—e.g. for political controversies—don't apply. This doesn't happen very often, perhaps once every couple weeks. In such cases the community will is unmistakeable, the story will keep coming up until it gets an airing, and our job is to let that happen.
I like it much better when we call these right from the beginning, but what are the odds that an r/conspiracy Hillary investigation would turn into a solid HN thread? Too small for the human eye, and no set of moderation rules can operate at that fine a grain.
This happens with every single story that touches on this subject. Over the course of the summer it's happened time after time - the flag brigade gets almost all of them.
After the flag-killed story today was reset, it still never showed up on the main page, despite hundreds of votes, although it did show up on /classic.
I noticed the same.
For instance: not so long ago there was a story on HN that reported the fact that Google's autocomplete suggestions have a strange bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, which doesn't seem reflect the popularity of the suggested sentences. It got flagged quickly and removed. Probably because the source was sputnik.com, a Russian news site.
But the phenomenon that was reported was true, it was easy to verify by yourself.
I don't see why these kind of posts should be flagged and removed. Maybe you don't agree with their content, but then why not have a discussion about them? In this case I would have been interested in hearing an explanation for those autocomplete suggestions.
How did the thread suddenly drop below the fold? How was the thread marked as 254 points on the home page and at the same time 312 inside the thread? Thanks
The user is using a popular HN plugin which lists "254" as the number of comments, not number of points. See the second photo for another place the "254" comments is displayed.
The user is likely misunderstanding how the plugin works.
Just in case you are genuinely asking, "Correct the Record" is a PAC that pays people to promote Hillary Clinton in a positive light online and also discount any negative online publicity she gets.
By saying that the GP was trying to "correct the record", he's implying that the GGP is a paid shill for Hillary.
Their comment is referencing Correct The Record, a pro-Clinton PAC which, according to a popular but false Reddit rumor, employs commenters to anonymously spread propaganda. See also:
Edit: At the time of this edit, three replies have asked for a citation on "false", so I may as well put it here.
Barrier Breakers 2016, the subject of the original The Daily Beast article that spread the rumor [1], is a real project that spreads messaging (call if propaganda if you want) supporting Clinton. But that messaging is not anonymous or covert. Here are some of their social media accounts:
They post a lot of stuff - the @nobarriers2016 Twitter account has three posts in the last hour. But the accounts are clearly marked as a project of Correct the Record, and the glossy images they share are not even remotely pretending to be grassroots.
According to their spokesperson, they do not have an additional covert operation:
> “Barrier Breakers accounts are always identified as Correct the Record,” spokesperson Elizabeth Shappell said.
That article is a good read in general and explains what they mean by "pushing back":
> In an exchange on May 24, a Twitter user with a bio that reads “Conservative Republican. Trump SUPPORTER. Fox news viewer,” wrote: “Whenever CROOKED HILLARY gets a tough question she either bursts into that blood curdling laughing cackle or starts barking like a dog. #LIAR.” Correct the Record responded with #ImWithHer and a graphic of Clinton with text reading: “She’s the most vetted person on earth. And standing STRONGER than ever.”
(You can find the tweet in question by searching - the response was from the @CTR_DZ account.)
Personally, I consider this approach fairly lame, in line with the brand social media accounts that sometimes show up in my Twitter replies when I complain about the brand. If I got a message from them, I doubt I would feel especially encouraged or interested in resharing their images. But that's a far cry from being immoral, which I think employing anonymous commenters to skew the public debate would be.
Of course, I can't present absolute proof that they are telling the truth about not having an additional covert operation. But there is no evidence whatsoever that they do have one, only baseless speculation about "paid shills", of the sort that's been around forever (I remember when I used to read Slashdot, closer to its prime, and it was Microsoft that supposedly employed an army of them there), combined with a distorted understanding of a real project.
Occam's razor doesn't apply when the involved party has made malicious intent explicitly clear. Her own campaign has made it quite clear that they're doing this.
Why is this getting down voted? There's no place for these accusations on HN. Using them to silence discussions is very arrogant because you're implying that people disagreeing with you are not capable of independent thought.
Well... not exactly an accusation, but I will admit it was a reference that was uncalled for. I have no reason to question the motives of that commenter.
I honestly can't understand how anybody is considering voting for Clinton or Trump. If this world was anything close to reasonable, Gary Johnson would win in a landslide. shrug
As a Gary Johnson supporter myself, I freely admit that he has some extreme policies that can turn off a lot of voters. But what really frustrates me is how many people I've heard from that do prefer him but are afraid to vote for him because of the spoiler effect.
I keep (wishful thinking) envisioning a scenario where he gets just enough votes that all of a sudden everyone on the fence realizes that maybe he could win and joins in, and then he launches ahead
Wishful thinking and politics aside: there's a term for that phenomenon on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite place it. Can anyone think of one? Where there's a slow growth until you get just enough of something and then it takes off?
Rather than just hoping for critical mass for one candidate, it would be nice to switch to something like ranked-choice voting (it's used at the local level already in some places like San Francisco I think). It's hard to advocate voting for 3rd parties with our current system, where causing the least-preferred candidate to win is by far the most likely outcome.
But what really frustrates me is how many people I've heard from that do prefer him but are afraid to vote for him because of the spoiler effect.
Yeah, I know what you mean. It's just that this time around, BOTH "major party" choices are SO bad, that you look at it and think "who cares whether Gigantic Douche or Turd Sandwich wins?" Ya know?
>Johnson accepted at least $9,000 in campaign donations from a prison company that ultimately won a state contract. By the time he left office, New Mexico led the country in for-profit prisons, housing 44 percent of its inmates in private facilities. Only Alaska, with 31 percent, came close.
>In 2000, after four inmates and a guard were killed in private facilities, Johnson vetoed an oversight bill and startled reporters by insisting that New Mexico had the best prisons in the nation.
Poverty:
>Within just a few months, the state had knocked more than 16,000 people off its welfare rolls, and its poverty rate had risen to first in the nation, according to a report from the state’s legislature.
Schools:
>For Democratic legislators, the trouble wasn’t just that Johnson wanted to divert money from the public system to private institutions. It was that his plan would privilege rich families in the long run, said Charles Bowyer, who served as government-relations director of the teachers’ union during Johnson’s tenure. Tuition at the most prestigious private schools often cost around $8,000 or $9,000 — meaning low-income families could never afford them, even with vouchers. And private schools would still be able to reject special-needs students.
Worth mentioning that Jacobin approaches things from a very left of center perspective. There may be many HN readers who are Libertarian and disagree ideologically with the Jacobin view of the world (I happen to agree with it)
Realistically, given how little exposure third party candidates get, there's no chance of any third party winning this year. Most voters don't even know they're running.
Thus, it becomes a choice of 1) making a symbolic vote for a third party to "show them", 2) helping Clinton win, and 3) helping Trump win.
Given the potential outcomes of Trump vs Clinton, a lot of people believe (rightly, IMO) that this electoral cycle is not a good time to make symbolic gestures or long-term strategic voting games. Too much is at stake. Status quo sucks, but is still infinitely better than the alternative.
>there's no chance of any third party winning this year.
There's really never a chance for third parties to rise in the US because we use a crappy voting system (first past the post). We should change our voting system to Range Voting [1].
Curious, can anyone comment on how fair NPR is in terms of covering 3rd party candidates? How about covering all candidates during a primary? I'm sick of great candidates being steam rolled in the popularity contest we have in politics and I wonder if we have anyone that covers them all adequately.
Given the potential outcomes of Trump vs Clinton, a lot of people believe (rightly, IMO) that this electoral cycle is not a good time to make symbolic gestures or long-term strategic voting games. Too much is at stake.
And a lot of us believe (rightly, IMO) that both Clinton and Trump are so equally bad, that there's no effective difference.
Me personally, if Gary wasn't in the race, I wouldn't cast a vote for President at all. shrug
Clinton may be corrupt and sleazy, but the country can survive 4 or even 8 years of that - it did many times before.
Whereas 4 years of a sociopath with megalomania, a definitive authoritarian streak, and a massive populist backing, I'm not so sure about.
Let me put it this way. As a third party supporter, your strategy, presumably, is to slowly accrue vote until your candidate of choice (or really, anyone who's willing to reform the electoral system to make third parties viable) breaks past the barrier. This presupposes that there is such a thing as elections, though. Say what you want about Clinton, but there's no viable threat from her in that regard. She might be prone to skirting the rules, but she doesn't rewrite them. Trump, on the other hand, seems to be a fan of the "strong hand". Last time my country of birth went for that, we ended up with a dictator in all but name. And the parallels between what I heard people say there then, and what I see people in US say now, are making me very nervous.
Corruption is the #1 thing that destroys countries. Nothing else comes close.
A "sociopath with megalomania" on the other hand can't really do much to hurt the country (no one would let him). And I don't see how "a definitive authoritarian streak, and a massive populist backing" are a problem.
i.e. secret damage to a country is much worse than open damage.
> Corruption is the #1 thing that destroys countries. Nothing else comes close.
Really? Militaristic jingoism has historically been a pretty popular choice to commit national suicide, for example.
The thing about corruption is that it's not violently destructive. It slowly erodes the system, but it takes a lot of time, and the process is reversible at practically any point.
> A "sociopath with megalomania" on the other hand can't really do much to hurt the country (no one would let him).
That seems to be a common retort that I've encountered among reluctant Trump supporters - that checks and balances would prevent anything really damaging.
I don't feel like it's particularly well supported by experience. Just to give a simple example, not only Japanese-American internment during WW2 was found to be legal and constitutional, but the corresponding SCOTUS decision (Korematsu) still stands. Which means that the president can sign a similar EO, and it'll be in force per existing precedent until SCOTUS gets a chance to overturn - and even then there are no guarantees.
And then there's a slew of accumulated post-9/11 precedent, which, in the hands of someone who thinks that torture is a good idea, among other reasons, "because they deserve it", could blow up big time.
> And I don't see how "a definitive authoritarian streak, and a massive populist backing" are a problem.
I'm not sure how to respond to that.
If you mean that you don't see it as desirable, but also don't think that it's dangerous, I would like to remind you that this is something that has repeated many times in history in the past 100 years alone, and pretty much every time resulted in authoritarian societies, with all that entails - political dictatorships, massive human rights violations, and often, wars with neighbors.
If you mean that you actually see it as desirable, I don't think that we have sufficient common ground to meaningfully discuss this subject.
Yep, the thing different about this election that is that we really have two bad candidates that is hard to like.
With previous elections even the candidates that were disliked and lost didn't seem as bad:
I'm with you, Johnson all the way. Voting for someone who's positions I mostly align with, who would do the best job for our country with the least amount of drama. Not for the lesser of two evils, or to make sure the "other guy" doesn't win. That's not a protest vote.
While he should have known, I actually think that asking that question was more admirable than attempting to BS his way through something he didn't know about.
That Aleppo thing is a total joke. If our foreign policy wasn't a complete joke, there would be no need for the President to know anything about Aleppo. As it is, it's still questionable if there's any reason for him/her to do so.
Keep in mind, Johnson is running for President, not Chief Cartographer.
The civil war in Syria has been one of the most critical situations in US foreign policy for several years now. It has consequences for the stability of the region and the rise or fall of IS, it has consequences for the security of Israel, a key ally, and it has consequences for how our modern relationship with Russia continues to develop.
You can call our foreign policy a joke, but it's inexcusable for someone running for the most powerful office in the world to not have even a cursory knowledge of it.
Easy- Duverger's Law. One of Clinton or Trump will be president. If you vote for one of those two people, you get to influence that outcome. I view voting as a strategic act, not a moral stand.
Keep in mind, "Duverger's Law" isn't a law in the same sense that gravity is. That is, it's more of an observation of how things usually are... it's not an inviolable fundamental principle of the universe.
If you vote for one of those two people, you get to influence that outcome.
You're not influencing the outcome when the outcome is the same in both cases.
Obviously the outcome won't literally be exactly the same. Whether we consider them to be "the same" in a practical sense depends on what we care about. Different people care about different things, so different people will disagree about how different the candidates are.
I was going to vote for Hillary, but after Sander's success, she started making promises that just mimicked his. She is not going to bring jobs back to the United States.
I might not vote for a president this year. I feel kinda dizzy just writing that last sentance.
There's a small part of me that thinks if the right third party candidate/person, back by a ton of money, jumped into the race this week, he/she might win.
At this point, if Bill Maher jumped in; I would vote for him.
Hell--if Jimmy Kimmel jumped in, I would vote for him.
I don't even know these two guys, but I trust they would try to do the right thing, or at least delegate to the right people.
I rember feeling a sence of doom when Regan was running, but the world was so different, and I was in high school.
As someone said before, this election is beyond weird.
I like Johnson (I agree with him about 70% of the time and think he has good character). There's no way he has a chance now that he wasn't included in the debates.
I have yet to see a single example of Trump's racism. It's an oft repeated cliche that has yet to be demonstrated by anyone. As much of a "clown" as trump might be, half of his labels are completely pulled out of thin air.
Trump was sued repeatedly in the 70s for racially prejudiced housing policies. In the 80s he was accused of racist employment practices in his casinos. In this election he has repeatedly retweeted and positively engaged with white supremacists on twitter. He has retweeted (false) racially-charged statistics.
I sympathize with the alleged prejudiced housing policies, if they are in fact true. I don't get the outrage about tweets. The tweets that got re-tweeted weren't racist in the least, is the guy or gal in charge of his Twitter account (I assume it's not him, i'll give you that) supposed to look at the history of every tweeter to see if tweets they come across are from racists? If anything, one of the staffers doing the retweet screwed up and didn't vet the messenger, but that's hardly a blemish on Trump other than "lesson learned, vet your tweets better."
Edit: Some of the tweets he's re-tweeted are pretty questionable, i'll give you that much. I only saw a couple before, one about Jeb Bush which one article had as it's prime example so I was pretty confused.
In 1989 he reportedly said "Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day."
He spent 5 years pushing the birther conspiracy even after Obama produced his birth certificate. He also implied that Obama was a Muslim despite his claims to the contrary.
He's implied several times that Obama sides with terrorists because of his upbringing.
He said a judge was unqualified to preside over a Trump University lawsuit because he was Mexican (turns out he was born in the US 60 years ago.)
Paul Ryan called it a "textbook definition of racism".
He started his campaign with this quote: "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Despite the fact that studies show first generation immigrants don't commit more crimes than native born citizens.
He uses language like "My African American", "The Muslims", and "The Hispanics" when talking about minority groups.
He refused to disavow David Duke on air until he "researched him more." He said he didn't know who he was, but it turns out there are numerous example of him mentioning David Duke in the past. He had primaries in southern states coming up, so publicly disavowing David Duke would have likely hurt him. Especially since David Duke has been campaigning for him. He did eventually disavow him after the media made a huge deal about it.
He repeatedly refers to Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas".
He said "They don’t look like Indians to me" about a Native American tribe that ran a competing casino.
He said "Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” he mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing." about a Black Lives matter protester at his rally.
He said "I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate." when asked about supporters who beat a homeless Latino man because "they all need to be deported."
I recall him referring to Elizabeth Warren as "Fauxcahontas", but I may just have that ingrained after her unsubstantiated claims keep resurfacing in Massachusetts politics.
> In 1989 he reportedly said "Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day."
Last I checked, "Jewish" was not an ethnicity, but a belief system.
> He spent 5 years pushing the birther conspiracy even after Obama produced his birth certificate. He also implied that Obama was a Muslim despite his claims to the contrary.
Muslim is not a race. How is asking if the president was born in the US racist?
> He's implied several times that Obama sides with terrorists because of his upbringing.
Upbringing is a race?
> He started his campaign with this quote: "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.
Mexico is a country, not a race.
> He said a judge was unqualified to preside over a Trump University lawsuit because he was Mexican
Mexican is not a race. Louis CK is mexican.
> He uses language like "My African American", "The Muslims", and "The Hispanics".
African american is not a race. Charlize Theron is African American. Islam is not a race, it's a belief system. Hispanics - so he's racist against Spaniards or just mestizos?
> He refused to disavow David Duke on air until he "researched him more." He said he didn't know who he was, but it turns out there are numerous example of him mentioning David Duke in the past. He had primaries in southern states coming up, so publicly disavowing David Duke would have likely hurt him. Especially since David Duke has been campaigning for him. He did eventually disavow him after the media made a huge deal about it.
He did eventually disavow him, after agreeing with none of his views. Your point is?
> He repeatedly refers to Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas".
She has provided no documentation for her purportedly Native American heritage, even when pressed by the Cherokee.
> He said "They don’t look like Indians to me" about a Native American tribe that ran a competing casino.
How is that racist? I often say to my friends "I thought you were Japanese. You don't look chinese."
> He said "Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” he mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing." about a Black Lives matter protester at his rally.
Way to dog whistle. He said his actions are deplorable, and he mentioned the (racist) name of the movement he was associated with.
> He said "I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate." when asked about supporters who beat a homeless Latino man because "they all need to be deported."
Was the homeless Latino man an illegal immigrant or a citizen? If he was an illegal immigrant, he should be deported.
It's one of those blanket cliches that gets applied reflexively. For a not insignificant sliver of the population, "Republican" == "racist" is an axiom, all evidence for, against, or sideways be damned.
Long-shot speculation: I wonder if the Democrats have decided that Hillary is going to lose against Trump. Maybe they, and not the GOP, are throwing her under a very fast bus.
Does anyone know what happens in the unlikely event that Clinton is placed under indictment before the election? Does Kaine move up the ticket? Does the DNC pick someone else entirely? What options do the electors have?
>. Each party has its own protocol for this scenario, but in neither case does the running mate automatically take over the ticket. If John McCain were to die before the election, the rules of the Republican Party authorize the Republican National Committee to fill the vacancy, either by reconvening a national convention or by having RNC state representatives vote. The new nominee must receive a majority vote to officially become the party candidate. If Barack Obama were to die before the election, the Democratic Party's charter and bylaws state that responsibility for filling that vacancy would fall to the Democratic National Committee, but the rules do not specify how exactly the DNC would go about doing that. (Congress could also pass a special statute and push back Election Day, giving the dead candidate's party time to regroup.)
I was getting ready to point out that Hillary really has a large lead, even if the day-to-day talking heads insist on making this and every race/issue seem as if it is 50/50 split. Then I checked 538.com [1]: they have her at 60% chance of winning -- pretty strong lead and hardly a normal time to throw someone under the bus -- but those graphs should be terrifying team Hillary.
Don't use that site for any insight. Nate Silver had Trump at a "1%" chance of winning the GOP primaries. He then admitted that he got the call wrong because he really didn't have any models and was just spitballing with friends. His accuracy in the previous general election was based on the fact that he had visibility into private polling (WAY more accurate) and other forecasters didn't.
He did have models, and they correctly predicted Trump's victory. He chose to disregard them. Then he wrote a mea culpa article explaining his mistake, which he is unlikely to repeat.
> His accuracy in the previous general election was based on the fact that he had visibility into private polling (WAY more accurate) and other forecasters didn't.
Where did you hear that? I'm not doubting you I'm just interested because I've never heard this before. My understanding was that he was so accurate last time around because the election followed normal patterns and his math was just better than everyone else's gut.
Could you elaborate? Is "private polling" the same as "internal polling," which is done by the campaigns? If so, my understanding was that the Romney camp's internal polls in 2012 turned out to be extremely inaccurate.
My preferred stats site has firmly switched to Tannenbaum (of Minix) and http://www.electoral-vote.com - 538 has felt more like horse racing for ESPN this past cycle than statistical analysis and news items.
The reason I'm worried is that it's becoming increasingly clear why the GOP was so enthusiastic about blocking Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to SCOTUS. That never made any sense, except in a bizarro world where they were very sure they weren't going to lose the Presidency.
Nate Silver has been wrong at every single juncture, as have the rest of the polls. We're off the beaten path and down the rabbit hole, and now we're staring at a trap door in a dark sub-basement that even the rabbit didn't know was there.
It also makes sense if you don't assume that GOP is a monolithic hivemind.
Every politician ultimately wants to gain a position of power, and remain in it. Aligning themselves with a party lets them tap into that party's electorate, but said electorate also expects them to hold to certain opinions, and perform certain token rituals to demonstrate that - so they do that. It doesn't even matter that the long-term end result would be detrimental to the party in this case - what matters is that a GOP politician who'd publicly reject the block would lose a lot of votes in their next election.
And because US only has single-member districts, not party lists, this mode of thinking dominates, and can destroy the party from the inside.
The only person that's had a pretty good batting average on this election so far is Scott Adams - it's downright eerie the way he's called it almost since this time last year.
>The reason I'm worried is that it's becoming increasingly clear why the GOP was so enthusiastic about blocking Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to SCOTUS. That never made any sense, except in a bizarro world where they were very sure they weren't going to lose the Presidency.
How does that not make sense? They've been blocking everything they can since they got the majority.
Same thing that will happen with Trump although whatever that is isn't very clear. Though, I think it's a long shot that you indite clinton over this. She should be insulated. Trump, on the other hand, has been indited for TrumpU
well there are other laws (eg violations of certain statutes that some accuse clinton of breeching) but there is no per se morality test in terms of ideas. The latter is a fundamental pillar of separation of powers.
Meanwhile there is a picture of Hillary embracing a KKK member that the corrupt media refuses to mention. The kingmakers don't give a good goddamn about racism, except as a convenient narrative for purges. The 21st century equivalent of accusations of communism.
“It is almost impossible to imagine the United States Senate without Robert Byrd. He was not just its longest serving member, he was its heart and soul. From my first day in the Senate, I sought out his guidance, and he was always generous with his time and his wisdom.” -- Hillary Clinton
By the end of his career Robert Byrd was a repentant, former KKK member.
Trump is being embraced by current, active KKK members.
It is obtuse to pretend there's no difference between the two.
From your own Wikipedia link:
"In his last autobiography, Byrd explained that he was a KKK member because he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook — seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions."[23] Byrd also said, in 2005, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."[13]"
>Trump is being embraced by current, active KKK members.
Being embraced by and embracing are very different things. There are statistically going to be child rapists that support both candidates, does that make them both child rapists?
Way to give the half 'truth' there, it's a supreme irony that DT supporters are ready to call anyone a shill but are just fine parading lies because they feel repeating it often enough makes it true.
> Meanwhile there is a picture of Hillary embracing a KKK member
actually
> Meanwhile there is a picture of Hillary embracing a FORMER KKK member who said that joining the KKK was "the greatest mistake I ever made."
Man go read Byrd's wiki page or really any piece of information before presenting a faux defense
"Senator Byrd came to consistently support the NAACP civil rights agenda, doing well on the NAACP Annual Civil Rights Report Card. He stood with us on many issues of crucial importance to our members from the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, the historic health care legislation of 2010 and his support for the Hate Crimes Prevention legislation," stated Hilary O. Shelton, Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau
You say that as if the media sycophants would not be trumpeting such a connection 24/7 if Trump had one. That is my point. It does not matter if he claimed to have repented (you know, after filibustering the Civil Rights act of 1964), they would have spun it against him anyway. The fact that they haven't even mentioned Byrd is proof of bias.
edit for dang: Thank you for Correcting The Record. If you're going mark accusations of racism as off-topic, you should have done so a little further up-thread.
I'll give you props for not leaving an article like this flagged and dead for once. Too big to sweep under the rug?
>In case it's a concern: we don't care what your specific ideology is.
"We just cannot allow Donald Trump to become president. It would destroy this country." -- Paul Graham.
"I am contributing to both vote.org and voteplz.org, and probably two other get-out-the-vote non-profits. There are different approaches to this problem and I'm not sure which will work best, but unlike many for-profit startups it's non zero-sum–we have a long, long way to go to 100% voter turnout, and all the organizations working on this share the same fundamental goal. This feels like the most important US presidential election I've ever witnessed, and I want to do whatever I can to make sure we're all involved. -- Sam Altman
You're literally repeating clinton talking points. Do you think you're contributing to the discussion amongst people that in no way believe any of the garbage you just wrote?
Because she's trying to assign guilt by association. I'm sure most people that support white supremacy are, in fact, Trump supporters.
Does that logically make all Trump supporters white supremacists?
And what is wrong with a bit of Nationalism? I personally feel globalization has most been a clever campaign to allow large business to play wage arbitrage. The current division of wealth in the US supports my idea.
>Does that logically make all Trump supporters white supremacists?
She never said that all Trump supporters are white supremacists. Did you listen to the quote? She said half of Trump supporters were racists, homophobes, xenophobes, etc... If you look at the polling data, her comments were pretty well supported.
Agreed. But some of us would go a little further. When you see a crowd around a bully and a blowhard, you can be sure they are almost all weak and cowardly.
I only know about what I see of that guy, plus a knowledge of human nature. Just an observation. Been true since grade school, held true all my life. Why would it change now?
White nationalists support him more than any other Republican candidate and it's largely because he panders to them with thinly veiled or occasionally overt racism.
I think everyone who supports a Republican candidate supports Trump more than any other Republican candidate at the moment, seeing as how, y'know, the party picked him to represent them in this election. This doesn't prove anything?
Other than the fact that dozens of prominent Republicans have rejected him? Including former Republican Presidents of the United States... who have come out and said they will vote for HRC, and that they do so because they can't bring themselves to vote for a tyrannical monster?
Lol. Downvoting me doesn't change the fact that GWB and other prominent Republicans are choosing to vote for HRC over Trump. You can hit that down arrow all you want, facts are facts and I'm sorry they bother you so.
From the way it reads it looks like he is asking how to bulk remove an email address from the archived messages so when they are turned over they don't contain the redacted email address.
I assume it would be embarrassing and/or problematic to share the email addresses of various ambassadors and other government officials in public records. You could also read something nefarious into it if you want.
This whole fishing expedition is hilarious and transparently political. The Bush administration ran private email servers to avoid FOIA requests, then nuked millions of saved emails when his term was up to avoid handing them over. I didn't see any huge circus or massive outcry about that.
The idea that we should be able to immediately read all the correspondence written by any public official also seems silly... it just encourages public officials not to use email. People are allowed to have private conversations. A reasonable compromise might be a time limit... say emails are held sealed for X years after leaving office, then made public?